Tag: #Shakespeare400

Happy Halloween/ All Hallows/ Whatever pagan ritual you might be celebrating this evening. Here we share our production meeting funtimes and also a little selection of some creepy characters for you to indulge your inner scaredy cat!

We are delighted to share a little of the behind the scenes work (fun) that has gone into this project! Please come and share a laugh at the various antics edited together for your viewing pleasure from our resident wonder Victorine.

We are super chuffed to announce we have another winner among our nominations for the British Council’s #ShakespeareLives Competition! We have a huge fondness of Lavinia and are so pleased she has been recognised. It was a really rewarding collaboration with puppet maker and puppeteer Joanna May.

Titus Andronicus is a violent, bloody play where many people are mutilated and murdered. Lavinia is raped and then has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off so she cannot tell her father Titus of her assault. She eventually communicates it to him and in revenge he murders her attackers before killing his daughter out of shame.

Our Lavinia’s soul speaks to us directly – this voice cuts through the silence and her pain and shouts out at the injustice of her life and death. The use of puppetry in filming this souliloquy was important to give layers to how our Lavinia with no mouth or hands shares her story.

There is an important question for all puppetry work – why a puppet? I don’t think you could have a live person acting this work. Listening to it yes, a voice disembodied but an actual actor you see I think would detract from both the violence inflicted on the character and what she was reduced to. This little puppet shows us the depths of meaning of Lavinia’s words. So, listen.

Thank you again to everyone that voted, we have plans for Lavinia for 2017 so stay tuned for further adventures from this little poppet.

Meantime, enjoy a flashback to her celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th birthday!

We are excited to announce that Lady Macduff In Souliloquy – from Cycle 4 of this project has been nominated for the #ShakespeareLives Competition. Please vote for us!

If you have already voted for us and you return to the website, barring any glitches it should be rather easy for you because a) you are potentially still logged in or b) you already have an account so click on login and get going. DO NOT try and login through any pop ups, instead click on the login button on the menu and follow that pathway through – then find video and vote.

If you have not voted yet and would like to: Here is a link directly to the registration page: https://films.shakespearelives.org/registration/ – because it is a glitchy website it works better to register first and then watch and vote. You can also find this page by clicking the login button on the main menu, scrolling down and clicking on register a new account.

To register using an email address it won’t work unless your password is exactly 8 characters total and has a capital letter, a number and another character (#$£%!). This feature is not explicitly stated on the website and it will just block you and say there is an error with the password. We suggest choosing a six letter word – capitalising the first letter and putting the symbol and number after ie. Juliet#5 – otherwise logging in through social media is apparently easier.

If you are logging in using social media and have verified your account, you should login in via the login button and page NOT THROUGH clicking on the video vote now and subsequent pop up. This feature just doesn’t work at all.

We have done very well on this platform and would very much love to continue with that so please do vote for Lady Macduff, show her some love as she doesn’t get much in Macbeth. As mentioned in previous posts… this is such great exposure for our project and we have already had a nice little bump in views for the featured videos but we need more votes (lots of lovely round 10s please) to raise our average scores and get us shortlisted as winners. Public voting is always a difficult thing and the best way we can actually ensure we do well on this platform is for loads of people we know to give us a bit of love.

Time is running out to vote for the souliloquies we have had nominated for the British Council’s #ShakespeareLives shorts competition. The videos videos are voted on by a team of judges and the general public – we would love you to register and vote for us*

Here is a link directly to the registration page: https://films.shakespearelives.org/registration/ – because itis a glitchy website it works better to register first and then watch and vote for our videos. You get one vote (four categories) per video – so please do vote for all our 5 nominated ones!

Again rather than clicking on vote now it is a smoother process if you click on LOGIN on the menu at the top and register a new account.

This is such great exposure for our project and we have already had a nice little bump in views for the featured videos but we need more votes (lots of lovely round 10s please) to raise our average scores and get us shortlisted as winners. Public voting is always a difficult thing and the best way we can actually ensure we do well on this platform is for loads of people we know to give us a bit of love.

We are so excited for you to revisit the ones you have already seen (watching them again is very rewarding people) or if you have yet to dive into this little project of ours these five videos are an excellent starting point.

Thank you!
Tilly and Victorine x

*It’s a little annoying to register using an email address as it apparently won’t work unless your password is exactly 8 characters total and has a capital letter, a number and another character (#$£%!). This feature is not explicitly stated on the website and it will just block you and say there is an error with the password. We suggest choosing a six letter word – capitalising the first letter and putting the symbol and number after ie. Juliet#5 – otherwise logging in through social media is apparently easier.

I recently submitted a play to an organisation that strongly recommended the writer adding in a #DiversityPledge to the script – explicitly encouraging producers to think of a diverse and representative cast. It’s an interesting idea to get the writer engaged in this and it got me thinking again about our responsibilities as artists to reflect the world and challenge perceived norms of representation.

In Souliloquy is at the heart about re-representation. It is about the selective voices we get to hear in a text, it is about giving forgotten characters a stage and it is about entering a dialogue with classic Shakespearean texts and deepening our understanding of them. Our tagline:

A question, a consequence, a soul seeking an audience.

Is an unrelenting promise. These are voices that have something to say and they are going to say it, however confronting it might become.

Much of this engagement is explicitly feminist -the majority of the characters we have produced so far are women, for the majority of the female characters in Shakespeare’s play have little agency or have time and presence when it suits the plot and are then discarded. Characters such as Lady Macbeth (one of the most feared and reviled women) and Ophelia (the most fetishized) are so much a part of our collective culture but are silent in response. They both die offstage, their deaths only registering in brief reactions of their male love interests.

Undersung or misrepresented are the two words we chose to help shape the project early on and they have guided us through curating the characters we have chosen. It is not surprising that most are women.

Characters such as Viola and Marina are rarely taken seriously – are dismissed as silly women in silly situations. But at their core both of these women are incredibly strong, take initiative and control of their life and situation and it is them that drive the action of the plot of their plays. These pieces give them a chance to express this, a platform to share directly with an audience.

Those with a traditional happily ever after are too given chance speak beyond that. Our Titania surprises both herself and her husband and Miranda dreams of the sea. These are complicated people, who exist beyond their titles and roles in society.

Our work also addresses the graphic violence towards women in a very different way to the source texts – where it is often used as little more than a plot device (Emilia’s murder in Othello) or as a way to illustrate a man’s character development (Lady Macduff and her family’s murder in Macbeth). Lavinia of course is so brutally treated – there are no words – but to not listen is far worse.

Our other characters (female and otherwise) fall into similar patterns of reclaiming their words (Cassandra), their position in society (Doll Tearsheet), their death (Cleopatra)…

And then of course, there is Juliet – our first released video from all the way back in Cycle 1 – unpacking the meaning of her final choice.

There is so much there in all of these words and experiences and characters – we felt the need to share these. I felt the need to write them. Because at the end of it all what is a Souliloquy? It is a testimony that we are forced to listen to.

Our Lavinia speaks of a truth that we shall one day listen. This blog is about the truths of women in Shakespeare’s works (we have a fair few blokes given new voices and truths too) and how they might address an audience directly as so many of them are denied. The female voice and experienced is so often viewed and distorted through a male pen, lens and direction we hoped to do something a little different.

Across our four cycles of In Souliloquy we have 16 new monologues written for female characters – classical characters redefined, re-imagined – angry, wistful, playful, heartbroken, strident and defiant they exist. They address their words to you, without waiting for permission or for another to speak. This is quite an unusual feat and we feel a pretty successful realisation of how we wanted to represent these characters.

However, we had an interesting experience as a team recently that made me feel the need to justify this project in terms of feminist representation and contemporary relevance. Sometimes I think people can be a little dismissive about revisiting and engaging with classical texts. Anyway, I started this post irritated at having to explain ourselves again but I don’t feel that anymore – writing this and revisiting the performances, words, direction and our production – I know.

Although there is always room for better, more diverse representation and we will strive for that in our developing project – In Souliloquy is proudly feminist – every step of the way.